40 Years by D & M Publishers

Author:D & M Publishers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Douglas & McIntyre

A YEAR AND a half after that chance encounter on one airplane, I stood in line to board another. This one was going to Spain. Lined up behind me was a posse of middle-aged women hauling backpacks. A word of advice: never divulge your intentions to the national media.

Allow me to explain.

Immediately after my conversation with Barry the Steward on that serendipitous flight to Vancouver, I headed off to do the TV interview. At the end of it, the genial host asked, “So, what’s your next adventure going to be?”

Without pausing or thinking through the consequences, I blurted, “I’ve decided to walk the Camino de Santiago.” It was a rather presumptuous and brazen declaration; I had only heard about the Camino a few hours earlier from Barry the Steward and would not have been able to point out the Camino’s route had you handed me a map of Spain. No matter. The studio audience applauded as they do for all lunatics on talk shows, and I said thank you and returned home.

Pandora’s Box opened just a crack, initially.

My friend Georgina was the first to get in touch. She shares my penchant for embracing an idea with a staggering amount of naïveté.

“I’ve always wanted to do the Camino,” she enthused via e-mail. “Would you like company?”

Would I like company? Would I want someone to share the torture of an extremely long hike through a country I knew nothing about?

“Sure!” I wrote back. The idea of having Georgina along as a companion was rather appealing. She’s a cautious but jolly sort, a good counterweight to my madcap-but-moody personality. I figured I could stand her for an entire month. Besides, she’s a priest, and to say no to a priest at the start of a spiritual pilgrimage was just inviting bad karma.

I originally intended to walk the Camino alone only because I assumed—incorrectly, as it turned out—that it would be difficult to find people willing to leave their loved ones and jobs for four weeks to walk a distance most people nowadays do by plane. Apparently there are more people than you might think who want to do this.

E-mails began arriving from people from across Canada, the United States, Britain, and Europe, all eager to come on a walk with me. I cleared their requests with Georgina and then said yes to them, too. Within a month I had a yes list of forty-five women. Somewhere in there was a hard lesson about knowing when to say no. That lesson came, as lessons do, much later.

We established from the beginning a very short list of criteria for our Camino trek. You had to be female, and you had to be within spitting distance of fifty years of age. No perky twenty-year-olds with designer water bottles and sleek blonde ponytails pulled neatly through their pink and white baseball caps. And no men, gay or straight. Men would change the dynamic of the group, we reasoned. Again, this was another lesson waiting to be learned.

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